Why many Pakistanis reject Malala

By Michael Kugelman

Foreign Policy|

Aug 15, 2017 | 3:53 PM

Pakistani Nobel Peace Laureate Malala Yousafzai meets with students of the University in Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, on July 11, 2017. (Safin Hamed / AFP/Getty Images)

On July 7, Malala Yousafzai posted her first tweet. Within hours, she had earned several hundred thousand followers and a warm welcome from the Twittersphere. Over the next few days, as word emerged on social media that she had recently graduated from high school and celebrated her 20th birthday, she garnered effusive praise and hearty congratulations from scores of Twitter users, including philanthropists, politicians and entertainers.

The reaction seems only natural, given Malala's story — her journey from getting shot in the head as a schoolgirl by a Taliban gunman in 2012, to becoming a Nobel Prize-winning advocate for female education worldwide, working out of her home in the United Kingdom since 2013.

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And yet, as always, some of her fellow Pakistanis reacted in a starkly different fashion.

Many on Pakistani Twitter decried her as shameful and traitorous. When I posted a tweet lamenting such characterizations, Pakistanis responded with fresh torrents of opprobrium for their compatriot. The criticism boiled down to this: There's nothing special about Malala. Many Pakistani children suffer worse fates than Malala. What has Malala ever done for Pakistan? Why does the world love Malala so much? And if Malala really cares about Pakistan, why doesn't she come back? The vitriol also included a bizarre but common conspiracy theory: Her shooting was staged.

To be sure, many Pakistanis admire and embrace Malala. Readers of the Herald, a Pakistani magazine, voted her person of the year for 2012. In 2014, a Pew survey found that 30 percent of respondents had a favorable view of her (a relatively low figure, but still higher than the 20 percent with unfavorable views).

In media interviews over the past few years, Pakistanis of various stripes — students, traders, shop owners, journalists, housewives and even rights activists — have registered their disapproval of Malala. Such disapproval occasionally takes more organized form: In November 2014, just a month after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the All Pakistan Private Schools' Federation — which claimed to represent 150,000 schools — announced an "I Am Not Malala" day and called for her memoir, "I Am Malala," to be banned. Enmity even emanates from her own community. In May, a Pakistani parliamentarian from Swat, Malala's home region, said the attack was preplanned and staged by a variety of players — and with official Pakistani government connivance no less.

The Robert De Niro story

On one level, such sentiment owes to the power of conspiracy theories. They're ubiquitous in Pakistan, where they're seen in school textbooks and heard in religious sermons and on prime-time television shows.

In 2013, the website of Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper that caters to the country's English-speaking, well-educated elite, published a savagely satirical blog post on Malala's shooting. It "revealed" how a CIA mission orchestrated the shooting. The triggerman? American actor Robert De Niro ("posing as an Uzbek homeopath"). Such are the depths of the power of conspiracy theories in Pakistan that some readers actually believed this absurd tale. Dawn had to add a caveat that the piece was fictitious.

Pakistan's middle class is the top conjurer and consumer of such conspiracies. But others embrace them too.

The implication is clear: If you believe the attack on Malala was staged, then you have no reason to respect her, much less revere her.

Conspiratorial thinking about Malala is strengthened by Pakistanis' deep mistrust of the West, where she is now based. Many suspect it of harboring designs on their country. Many Pakistanis contend that the West — through its strong embrace of Malala and the allegedly unlimited access it grants her to prominent platforms and top power corridors — is using her for its own purposes, whatever they may be.

The disclosure in 2013 that Malala's family had retained Edelman, a top American public relations firm, to assist with her media management has only heightened these suspicions. So have the views of Malala and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, which align with many in the West. Ziauddin has been associated with the Awami National Party, a leftist and secular political party in a conservative and deeply religious country.

Pakistanis' conspiratorial thinking is so powerful that Malala's actual work and messaging, much of which serves Pakistan in the most concrete and unglamorous of ways, is conveniently disregarded. The Malala Fund oversees several programs in Pakistan. According to the fund's website, these include providing educational opportunities to girls that had been domestic laborers; establishing educational programming for children fleeing conflict; and repairing classrooms and providing school supplies for girls' schools affected by flooding.

Jealousy and skepticism

And yet, there's more to this story than conspiracies. For all the talk of anti-Malala sentiment being the product of delusional thinking, such hostility can also be explained by a basic and ugly truth: Pakistan's lack of upward mobility and rigid class divides.

In Pakistan, upward mobility is a very tall order. The poor struggle mightily to escape to prosperity.

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And yet Malala bucked the trend and rose to the very top, from schoolteacher's daughter to embodiment of the global elite. True, Malala was not living in abject poverty in her early years; her father owned a school and was an English-speaking activist. Still, she's in a far different place today — both literally and figuratively — than she was five years ago.

Pakistanis aren't used to seeing this type of transformation — and particularly one that happens so quickly. And so, this disorienting reality provokes a range of responses. For some, it's admiration. For others, it's jealousy. For still others, it's skepticism, suspicion, and outright hostility. As Aamer Raza, an assistant professor at the University of Peshawar, recently put it to me, "Maybe the perceived repeated failure of people to climb the social ladder ... make(s) people distrustful of people who become rich soon without visible reasons like a sporting or performing arts career."

Additionally, in a deeply patriarchal society, Malala's gender raises even more suspicion about her transformation. A male Malala would be far more likely to be welcomed as a hero, not slated as a traitor.

Malala personifies what is admirable about Pakistan and its people: youth, resilience, bravery and patriotism. But her story also holds up a mirror to the country's dark side, not just in terms of terrorism, misogyny and conspiracy-mongering, but also its deep class divides and the sharply divergent worldviews generated by such fissures.